The Association of Commercial Stock Image Licensors (ACSIL) has completed the ACSIL Global Survey of Stock Footage Companies 2007, a comprehensive and detailed examination of the issues and challenges faced by leaders in the footage-licensing field.
The Global Survey takes a bottom-up approach to estimating the dollar size of the total footage industry, focusing specifically on a group of 355 active, commercial footage companies/departments identified as part of the study. The estimate of total industry annual revenue ($282 million) is built from the sum of the individual revenue estimates applied to each company.
"This report allows individual companies to understand their own performance within the context of the broader industry," said ACSIL Co-President David Sheehan. "And to have so many participants share information is one of the many delightful outcomes of commissioning this study."
Coming in at 259 pages, the report covers a broad spectrum of critical topics including: the state of digitization; the nature of current license agreements and rights packages; the emergence of new markets and customer types; changes in order volume; and current approaches to marketing and new business development. In addition to survey data collected from 67 key footage companies, the Global Survey includes an analysis and index of the global stock footage industry by estimated revenues, content type, web-functionality and region.
"There is so much information in the report and the synthesis is really a joy to read," said Peter McKelvy, Vice President of Footage and Music Services, Discovery Communications Inc. "For me, educating an executive team in a large company about the footage sales business, this report will be invaluable."
The industry was also analyzed based on a variety of other aspects including geographic distribution. For example, 48% of the companies analyzed in the Global Survey are based in the United States, accounting for $170 million in gross revenue or 60% of the global market. 24% are based in the UK, accounting for $63 million.
Founded as a non-profit trade association in early 2003 by a group of leading stock footage companies and news agencies in the United States, ACSIL is focused solely on the commercial interests of the stock footage industry, and meeting the demand for market data on this industry is central to ACSIL's mission. Please see "ACSIL" for more information.

The Global Survey will be made available on a commercial basis within the next two weeks. To be alerted when the Global Survey is ready for purchase, please join the Thriving Archives mailing list. An announcement will go out shortly. Alternatively, you can contact Thriving Archives directly at davidseevers@thrivingarchives.com to be included on the list. Thank you for your patience.